


Death Spiral

by LittleLostStar



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Disturbing Themes, Dream Logic, Gen, Hallucinations, Obsession, Psychological Horror, Surreal, Yuuri's darkest timeline, haunted video tapes, offscreen major character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 23:16:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20750393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleLostStar/pseuds/LittleLostStar
Summary: Yuuri’s had the tape for years now. He recorded it off TV the day that Victor Nikiforov set the all time world record free skate score, with a routine so beautiful and challenging and perfect that it made Yuuri burst into tears, knowing he could never be that good.Victor's final performance is the only one worth imitating, and so Yuuri has tried and tried and tried in vain, throwing everything else to the sidelines, desperately inching towards success—and that's when the tape begins to change.





	Death Spiral

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, friends. This is the piece I wrote for _In the Dark of the Night_, the YOI Horror Zine. I hope you enjoy it, and hope that you'll let me know if you did. With that said, please heed the warnings.

_ Quad flip. Quad salchow. Combination spin. Step sequence.  _

He breathes in sweat and gasps around it.

_ Triple loop. Quad flip, triple toe combo. Quad toe.  _

His face burns bright, flushed with blood hiding just under the surface, a balloon that could burst at any moment. The skates on his feet slice rivulets through the ice as easily as a blade tracing the curves of a vein.

_ Triple axel, double toe combo. _

He’s on an empty stomach because the spins make him dizzy. Half the time he’s skating blind, the world tilting and blurring, the dread mixing with nausea in his gut. He can spot the world bending away from him out of the corners of his eyes. The universe of the ice is not a flat plane; it slopes and curls, concave and convex, a triangle that never adds up to a hundred and eighty degrees. 

_ Triple axel, single loop, triple salchow combo. _

He falls. He barely feels it this time. 

_ Flying sit spin. Triple flip. _

He falls. He feels it even less. 

_ Combination spin. Finish. _

Yuuri lets his arms drop to his sides—the ruthless slump of a violent puppeteer cutting the strings. His heart is pounding in his throat, threatening to overcome him. His legs wobble, screaming for repose, but he won’t stop. The rink is still open; the sun is still up; he can still stand. 

Another wave of vertigo crashes into him. He squeezes his eyes shut until it passes, counting the breaths, mind already locked into the next attempt:  _ Again.  _

_ Quad flip. Quad salchow.  _

He can do this. Or he can die trying. 

~

Yuuri’s had the tape for years now. He recorded it off TV the day that Victor Nikiforov set the all time world record free skate score, with a routine so beautiful and challenging and perfect that it made Yuuri burst into tears, knowing he could never be that good. 

Yuuri’s been watching Victor his whole life. He’s been skating for nearly that long too, trying and trying, always one or two or a hundred steps behind, playing catch-up in a race that’s already been won. Victor always made it look effortless—each choreographic move a stunning dance, each jump a bird taking flight. Angelic, swan-like, graceful,  _ perfect _ .

Yuuri always planned to ask Victor how he did it, because he feels nothing  _ but _ effort when he skates. Effort is sucked from his veins, draining him dry, leaving his limbs shaky and uncoordinated; effort hangs heavy around his neck, dragging him down, making each jump feel like a failed escape attempt. His knees tremble when he lands; he can feel the cartilage disintegrating, can feel his bones tremble as they absorb the impact, can feel the shock wave of his own body weight radiating through him like a cancer. Every poorly landed jump makes the next one that much harder, makes him that much weaker, drags his ambitions that much further to the horizon. Every person who sees him skate gets the same look of pity in their eyes. 

Yuuri has studied every detail of the tape, memorizing blurry freeze-frames by squinting until his mind grasps the sharp edges of an answer. Each answer raises more questions; each still of Victor’s performance becomes a portrait hung in an ever-expanding museum of simultaneous worship and wrath. Yuuri has committed each second to memory, carving over birthdays and first kisses and childhood pets, gouging deep until everything else fades into the background. When his mind whispers  _ more,  _ craving something new, Yuuri just watches the tape again, finding a new detail he missed; he notes the lift of Victor’s index finger during the last sweep of his combination spin, stares at the colors of his costume so hard that the afterimage burns into his eyes. Time and again he is struck breathless by the gestalt that eludes him, by the whole being something entirely  _ else _ than the sum of its parts. Time and again Yuuri lets the tape break his heart, over and over, until he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t broken. 

Yuuri’s had the tape for years now. And it is  _ the _ tape—the definitive, the singular, the only. 

Victor Nikiforov’s best performance was also his last. 

~

_ Again. _

_ Quad flip. Quad salchow.  _

Triple flip. Triple salchow. 

_ Combination spin. Step sequence. _

Spun out on the ice. Stumbled through the sequence. 

_ Triple loop. Quad flip, triple toe combo. Quad toe. _

Triple loop. Triple flip, triple toe combo. Quad toe, just barely over-rotated, just barely fully scored.

_ Triple axel, double toe combo. _

The landing is heavy. Yuuri wiggles his toes, feeling the slick of blood between them. 

_ Triple axel, single loop, triple salchow combo. _

His breath is shoved from his lungs in a heaving sob.

_ Flying sit spin. Triple flip. _

He feels like nothing but a collection of bones barely held together in the fragile frame of his flesh. 

_ Combination spin. Finish. _

The blood in his boots squelches in a burst of warmth. Every part of him feels like meat, something to be sliced, torn, chewed, swallowed. 

Yuuri barely makes it off the ice before he throws up. It’s his best run by far. 

~

In his dreams, Yuuri sees Victor skating, gliding through space, wearing the very last costume he ever had, making history with every turn. 

In his dreams, Yuuri  _ is _ Victor skating, slithering into the negative space left behind, wearing a champion’s skin like an ill-fitting costume, matching himself to an atomic shadow on the wall of history. 

In his dreams he can do everything. He wakes up feeling heavier than he did yesterday.

~ 

_ Again. _

_ Quad flip. Quad salchow.  _

He’ll be stuck on triples forever—he’s sure of it. It seems mathematically impossible to achieve even one millisecond more of airtime. 

_ Combination spin. Step sequence.  _

How cruel of Victor, to place one right after the other. How merciless, how unfair, how audacious he was. How daring, how risky, how rewarding he could be. 

_ Triple loop. Quad flip, triple toe combo. Quad toe. _

His hand barely avoids grazing the ice, missing by millimeters. The successful quad toe feels like a consolation prize.

_ Triple axel, double toe combo. _

This one he can do. 

_ Triple axel, single loop, triple salchow combo. _

This one he can— _ fuck _ . 

_ Flying sit spin. Triple flip. _

He doesn’t pull out of the spin in time to get up enough speed for the flip. 

_ Combination spin. Finish. _

He does nothing but hang his worthless head. 

~

_ Again. _

He twists an ankle and takes exactly two days off. He can deal with the pain. He mumbles an excuse to someone who becomes yet another blurry shadow in his mind.

_ Again. _

He thinks maybe today is someone’s wedding, someone’s birthday, someone’s anniversary. When was Victor’s birthday again? Christmas. The worst and most wonderful gift imaginable. 

_ Again _ . 

His sister calls; something’s wrong at home. Yuuri wakes up shaking from a nightmare, and the thermometer under his tongue reads 100°F. 

_ Again. _

Victor could probably do this with his eyes closed. Yuuri should aim for nothing less.

_ Again. _

He’s so close. 

~

_ Quad flip. Quad salchow. _

Yuuri tries to avoid locking his knees as he lands, and sometimes he succeeds. 

_ Combination spin. Step sequence. _

There’s a moment, a glimpse, when Yuuri curves his arm over and behind his head, and he knows in his bones that he’s finally capturing a fraction of Victor’s natural grace. 

_ Triple loop. Quad flip, triple toe combo. Quad toe. _

Yuuri can do those quads now, finally able to bear the brunt of the winds of fate when they batter against him, conspiring to help him fail.  _ Maybe Victor would be proud _ , he thinks.  _ I can land quads that he’d already mastered by the time he was my age. What a fucking success story.  _

_ Triple axel, double toe combo. _

Yes. 

_ Triple axel, single loop, triple salchow combo. _

Yes?

_ Flying sit spin. Triple flip. _

His eyes widen, struck by the chill air of the rink as it whooshes past him.  _ Yes _ . 

_ Combination spin. Finish. _

He covers his mouth with his hands and falls to his knees. 

~

He’s done it. 

Yuuri can barely believe it. He staggers over to the rinkside and watches the recording he made of himself, just to be sure; he’s dreamed this before, woken up sobbing as his triumph dissolved before his eyes. He opens his phone to call someone, but doesn’t recognize any of the names in his address book, so instead he sits down hard, panting, his head too high in the clouds. The ice is cool under his legs; his skin is so hot that he’s sure he’ll melt it if he stays there too long, but he can’t get up.

He’s done it. He’s skated Victor Nikiforov’s last routine. 

Someone is laughing, a high-pitched squeal, a sound that’s shakily balancing on the precipice of hysteria. It becomes shriller, wracked with sobs, and as the air is sucked from his lungs Yuuri realizes that the sound is coming from him. 

That night, he grabs the bourbon that belonged to his last roommate before they moved out, months or years ago. He swills it straight from the bottle, squinting as the fuzziness in his head amplifies and echoes, a slurred refrain of the same thoughts. 

_ Quad flip. Quad salchow. Combination spin. Step sequence. _

For the first time in his worthless life, Yuuri actually wants to watch his own skating more than he does Victor’s. The errors in his routine stand out like bright beacons—a trailing leg, an awkwardly angled arm, a minute wobble in his landing that projects his inadequacy far and wide for anyone to see. It’s not perfect yet. But it’s a start. 

Yuuri loads the video of Victor onto his laptop and curls up in bed with it like a lover. He hits Play between tipsy blinks, holding his eyes open by sheer force of will. The routine begins with a beautiful shot of Victor standing in front of the Jumbotron screens, projecting an infinite number of cascading Victor Nikiforovs, all moving in sync. Yuuri mouths along to the words of a song in a language he cannot speak, his eyes trained on Victor’s gold skates.  _ Quad flip. Quad salchow. Combination spin. Step sequence.  _ He can feel the echo of the movements in his bones, burned there like sigils. 

_ Triple loop. Quad flip, triple toe combo. Quad toe. Triple axel, double toe combo. _

Victor was so beautiful. _ _

_ Triple axel, single loop, triple salchow combo. Flying sit spin. Triple flip—  _

—wait. 

Yuuri blinks. He scrolls back a few seconds on the video, fingers automatically finding timestamps he’d branded onto his brain long ago. 

_ Flying sit spin. Triple flip.  _

He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand, pressing so hard that he sees spots. He rewinds again. 

_ Triple flip.  _

But it’s not a flip. 

The bourbon surges back and he tumbles off the bed, landing with a hard thud on the floor and grabbing for his trash can just in time. As he retches, Yuuri tries and fails to remember the last time he got drunk. Did he get confused? Did he get sick? Did he black out? Was he always alone? 

As soon as his stomach is empty, he pulls the laptop down to the floor beside him, setting it on the rug with shaking hands. Rewinds. Hits play. 

_ Triple axel, single loop, triple salchow combo. Flying sit spin. Triple lutz. _

Another surge of nausea overtakes him; he’s shivering all over. How could he have missed it? How could he have gotten it wrong this whole time? How could he have been so  _ stupid _ ? 

Yuuri watches the moment in slow motion, again and again. It’s unmistakable, as plain as day: Victor does a triple lutz after his flying sit spin, landing hard on his right leg. Somehow Yuuri has been treating it as a flip this whole time. 

There’s a fraction of a second where Victor looks directly into the camera, and Yuuri can almost hear his taunting:  _ did you really think you could do this?  _

Later that night, in between sobs, Yuuri tries to give himself a break. He was still somewhat inexperienced when he first saw the video; mixing up the lutz and the flip isn’t unprecedented, and even advanced skaters sometimes flub it in competition. It doesn’t matter now; he can do a triple lutz—barely, but he can—and muscles can be retrained. 

He’ll go to the rink tomorrow. He’ll practice, as planned, and refine the routine. He’ll keep going until he succeeds.  _ I can do this, _ he tells himself, and for a moment it doesn’t even feel like a lie. 

~ 

_ Quad flip. Quad salchow. Combination spin. Step sequence.  _

He can push himself past any barrier. 

_ Triple loop. Quad flip, triple toe combo. Quad toe.  _

The individual pieces of the puzzle are starting to combine into larger chunks. 

_ Triple axel, double toe combo. Triple axel, single loop, triple salchow combo.  _

Yuuri imagines the day when an announcer will tell a rapt audience about how the triple axel is Skater Katsuki’s favourite jump. He imagines the day when he doesn’t touch down on the landing. He imagines the day when he’ll finally be worth a damn. 

_ Flying sit spin. Triple lutz. Combination spin. Finish.  _

Yuuri doesn’t even give himself one breath before he’s racing to the rinkside to check his progress. He presses Play on the camcorder, and the screen flickers to life and shows an arena filled to the brim with spectators, spotlights sweeping, and it’s  _ Victor  _ standing on the ice, not Yuuri. His beautiful silvery hair is matted with old blood, rusty brown and running down his neck, his head hanging at an odd angle. He begins to skate:  _ Quad flip. Quad salchow—  _

Yuuri’s heart drops to his toes as Victor holds one arm high above his head during the jump, his perfect pale wrist fluttering like a leaf. He sits back, mouth dry, too tired to stop a whole new flood of panic seeping into his brain. 

_ Again. _

~

_ Quad flip. Quad salchow, arm raised. Combination spin. Step sequence.  _

Yuuri’s had the tape for years now. He recorded it off TV the day that Victor Nikiforov set the all time world record free skate score. He can no longer remember what year it was. 

_ Triple loop. Quad flip, triple toe combo. Quad toe, both arms raised. _

This should be impossible. It’s all impossible. But somehow Victor did it, and so Yuuri must follow.

_ Triple axel, double toe combo. _

Yuuri’s scoured all over the internet but there are barely any other recordings of the performance. He finds one on a Russian streaming site, heavily pixelated, and there Victor seems to do a triple-triple combo at this point, which makes no fucking sense, but when he checks his own recording again—

_ Triple axel, single toe, triple loop combo. _

It’s never been like this before. Victor’s movements are brand new, even as the tape remains the same. 

_ Flying sit spin. Triple lutz.  _

Maybe Yuuri’s been under-rotating all this time, doing doubles where he thinks he’s doing triples. He thinks he knows who to call to ask, but he can’t remember their name. His emails to Victor’s old coach just bounce back automatically. 

_ Combination spin. Finish. _

It’s still not good enough. 

~

In his dreams, Yuuri sees Victor skating, over and over, trapped in a prison of his own making, only able to move his eyes back and forth to signal his desperation. 

_ I had to escape this life, _ he imagines Victor whispering. 

_ I wish I could have met you, _ Yuuri thinks, and then he sees Victor smile wide, the edges of his mouth crawling up his cheeks, blood dripping from his chin. 

_ You did,  _ he replies, voice echoing as his face remains grotesquely frozen.  _ Just once. The last time. _

Yuuri snaps awake with his heart pounding, palms sticky from where he dug his fingernails in deep enough to draw blood. He grabs for his phone, swiping away a text message notification so fast that he only sees the words  _ worried _ and  _ stop  _ and  _ doctor’s orders _ and  _ please  _ before it’s gone, and he thinks he may have imagined it like he’s imagined everything else. His breath comes in ragged shudders, lungs rasping around some infection or other. It doesn’t matter. 

_ Again. _

Yuuri is upright now; he presses Play on the recording of Victor and cradles a mug of tea in two shaking hands. His eyelids feel like they’re glued together, like he’s looking and listening but can’t actually see. 

_ Quad flip. Quad salchow, arm raised. Combination spin. Step seq—  _

—Victor stops dead on the ice and looks directly at the camera and when he smiles his mouth is full of blood— 

_ —uence. Triple loop. Quad flip, triple toe combo. Quad lutz, both arms raised. _

Yuuri drops his mug and hears it shatter; there’s a sudden blast of refrigerated air on his face, and when he looks down he sees steam rising as the tea burns pockmarks into the ice, which blister and bubble and  _ move _ — 

_ Triple axel, triple toe combo. _

Yuuri strains to hear the garbled sounds of the commentators, but all they’re saying is  _ you’ll never be good enough _ . That’s all they’ve ever said; that’s all  _ anyone  _ has ever said. He’s swaying in place, shivering uncontrollably, but he finds the inertia to skate to the middle of the rink, to take Victor’s starting pose. When the music begins, it seems flattened and out of tune. 

_ Quad flip. Quad salchow. _

Yuuri blinks as something  _ breaks _ , and suddenly everything is different. His body is so heavy, but his mind snaps free and floats high. There’s a faint rushing in his ears. 

_ Victor Nikiforov’s last performance was also his best.  _ Or maybe it’s the other way around. 

_ Again. _

He thinks he can see figures at the arena doorway, light surrounding them like a halo. He smiles and imagines raising a hand to wave at his audience. 

_ Again.  _

Someone is crying, sobbing his name, and he smiles and thinks  _ Quad flip. Quad salchow. _

_ Again. _

He can do this.

_ Again—  _

—or he can die trying. 


End file.
